Often associated with the short-lived Martian school of the 1980s, Christopher Reid’s poetry has come a long way since the extra-terrestrial metaphors and puzzling imagery that were the hallmark of his early writing. His gift for unusual, typically comic description…

William Cowper was a popular poet and writer of hymns. His descriptions of everyday life in the English countryside changed nature writing in the eighteenth century, in many ways preparing the ground for poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Cowper…

Burns started life as a ploughman in Scotland but is now one of the world’s most celebrated poets. Every January, his life is remembered with whisky, haggis, singing and dancing on Burns Night. Perhaps as a distraction from the hard…

Thomas Love Peacock is probably best known today for his hilarious Nightmare Abbey, which cheerfully satirizes the interest of contemporary literature in morbid subjects and gothic settings. Some of the targets of his broadly affectionate satire were significant literary figures…

Born in Ireland in 1667, Swift spent much of his adult life in England. He was actively involved in politics, and in his self-penned epitaph describes himself as a ‘champion of liberty’. He was a prolific writer of prose satire…

Christopher Smart was born in 1722 and is best remembered for his religious poems A Song to David and Jubilate Agno, both of which were written during his time at St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, London. He believed that God…

Samuel Johnson is a towering figure in the history of English literature, to the extent that the second half of the eighteenth century has sometimes been described as ‘the age of Johnson’. He was a poet, journalist, lexicographer, critic, essayist,…

In spite of needing to earn a living as a kitchen maid and her death from measles at the age of twenty-four, Mary Leapor left behind a substantial body of work. Her poetry has increasingly come to be seen as…

Luke Kennard is the author of numerous works of poetry and short fiction.  HIs first collection of poems, The Solex Brothers, was published in 2005, and won him one of that year’s Eric Gregory Awards. His second collection, The Harbour…

Peter Didsbury has described himself as ‘someone who’s constitutionally fascinated by myth and the weight of the past’ and indeed his poems seem to conjure a particular, possibly bygone England peopled with men working the land, butchers, fishermen, kings and…

Vona Groarke is one of the leading Irish poets of her generation. Born in Mostrim, Ireland, she studied at Trinity College, Dublin and University College, Cork. She has held positions at Villanova and Wake Forest Universities in the USA, and…

John Dryden was one of the dominant literary figures of the English Restoration period. He began his prolific and versatile writing career in the Puritan era before Charles II became king, and wrote verses on the death of Oliver Cromwell….

John Watson was born in 1939 in the Bland district in NSW. He went on to study mathematics at the University of Sydney and worked as a high-school maths teacher for thirty years until taking early retirement at fifty-five. He then…

Jonson was a skilful satirist of contemporary society, producing Volpone for the stage in 1606 and The Alchemist in 1610. It is highly likely that Shakespeare would have appeared in a production of another of Jonson’s plays, Every Man in…

John Wilmot was born in 1647, the son of Henry Wilmot, a celebrated Royalist who had led the cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill. Henry helped the young Prince Charles escape to France after the disastrous Royalist defeat at the…

Pope was born into a Catholic family in 1688, the year of The Glorious Revolution, when Catholics could not live in London – the centre of literary life – or attend university. At the age of twelve he contracted a…

Charles Boyle was born in Leeds, and worked in for a long time in publishing, including fourteen years at Faber and Faber. He is the author of six collections of poetry: Affinities (1977), House of Cards (1983), Sleeping Rough (1987),…

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1962; he grew up there, and in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, the U.S.A., Hong Kong, Bahrain and the UK. He holds a B.A. and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and studied…